Alianza Minerals (TSX-V: ANZ) CEO Jason Weber on Identification of New Targets & Additional Staking at the Horsthief Gold Property in Nevada


Jason Weber: I'm doing very well, thanks. And you?

Gerardo Del Real: I'm well. Thank you for asking. I wanted to get you back on because you had some news recently that I know is early in the project's history, but I believe it's important. You identified some new targets and you've expanded the Horsethief gold project in Nevada.

It's very interesting to me that in the news release you talked about the confirmation of the favorable host stratigraphy, which is important for this part of Nevada. Can you speak to that a bit? And then let's talk about the overall program and what it accomplished.

Jason Weber: Yeah, for sure. If you had an overall overarching goal for the project, that was really it. It comes down to the fact that these sediment-hosted gold deposits in Nevada, they occur on trend. The Carlin Trend, everybody investing in the gold space has probably heard of it. It's where some of the biggest deposits like this occur. So as geologists and explorationists, we get focused on these trends.

However, a few years ago a company called Fronteer Development, among others, went looking outside these known trends for where these types of deposits might occur. They really broke the mold with some of the exploration they did. In Fronteer's case discovering the Long Canyon deposit, which is now the Long Canyon Mine that Newmont is operating. That was a major discovery off the known trends and really proved that these types of deposits occur elsewhere at different age horizons within the stratigraphy.

In our case, Horsethief's an off-trend target. As we do in almost all exploration, we draw analogies to other projects. Long Canyon is one that we were using sort of as a template for our exploration. The work we did this year confirmed that we are dealing with the same age rocks that they are dealing with at Long Canyon. That was really important for us. The sort of the Cambrian-Ordovician contact that that age was confirmed in the work that we did. Detailed mapping, looking at things like fossils and the different units and correlating those back. We were able to identify that we do indeed have that age horizon exposed at the property.

Now to go along with that, very important, we are seeing evidence of fluid flow which is in the forms of various styles of alteration. And probably the one that stands out the most is the development of jasperoid within the carbonate rocks. And we're seeing that right near that contact. That's a very favorable place to be.

When we step back and look at what we're trying to accomplish this year with our partner Hochschild, it was really to prove that. Then, I guess bonus isn't the right word, but the work we were able to do also was able to pick out some characteristics within those carbonate rocks that are exposed on the property, features that are amenable to fluid flow and trapping gold and trapping gold-bearing fluids that could potentially form an economic gold deposit.

When you start putting all the pieces together and you add in some geophysics that we've done prior to us getting a hold of the property, we did a re-interpretation of that geophysics. It supports our theory. Now we're starting to get this sort of bigger sort of outline of our targets, where they might be and where we might want to be drilling.

From my perspective, it's been fantastic as we moved along in the program. Everything's just been confirming sort of our exploration ideas and what's been the template that's been guiding us. I look back at a program that was just basically mostly mapping and sampling and it was very, very successful. Very exciting for us.

Gerardo Del Real: Now you staked an additional 26 claims. You now have 5 primary targets. There's been historic drilling at the property, but I notice that most of it is typically about 100 meters or less in depth. A lot of the historicals ended in mineralization. Can you speak to that a bit on what the approach is going to be in 2020 when you get out there with the truth machine and see what's down under?

Jason Weber: As I said, the most obvious style of alteration that exists on the property is this jasperoid alteration. These jasperoids, they're very resistant, they're basically just silica so they stick out of the ground and they don't weather away as fast as the carbonate rocks around them.

Those were the focus of the drilling work that was done in the '80s. They looked at those jasperoid bodies and just basically tried to test those to see if there was enough gold in them to form an ore body. There isn't. We think those are sort of the upper limits and potentially lateral limits of what might be an ore body at depth. They didn't test, generally speaking, below those jasperoids. The longest hole might've been 130 meters if I remember correctly. They're not testing the stratigraphy very well below that.

Of course, with the detailed mapping we have now, we have a good handle on what that should be and it's telling us that in some cases we could have a target horizon, maybe 100 meters below depth. It might be 150 below surface, it might be 150 meters, it might be 200, 225, depending where we are on the property and what kind of rocks are overlying that.

That's really important to understand that their drilling, even though there's 4 holes I think that ended in mineralization. One hole was 13 meters of 1.22 grams gold. Another one was almost 40 meters of 0.8 grams per tonne gold. Those are exciting numbers for the types of drilling they were doing. We look at that though and say, “Okay that's indicative of something at depth.”

We did stake some more claims because we actually found more of these jasperoid bodies off to the northeast. When you go to the northeast on this, or generally to the east on the property, you get out of the carbonates and you get into a volcanic package. But we suspected that the volcanic package was just overlying carbonates and sure enough we can go off to the northeast and find new outcroppings of these new windows of these carbonates.

We staked some claims to cover those off. And then we added some claims to the south as well, just to cover some stratigraphy that we think may be prospective down there too. Now we've got all five of our targets comfortably encompassed within the claim group. Next year in 2020, as soon as we can get in there, we can start testing those.

The process now for us is looking at these targets and prioritizing. That's really just a discussion between our technical crew and the Hochschild team to try to mesh our two groups' ideas of where we should go next.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent. And you answered my next question, when you would be getting together with your partner to outline that drill program. I understand initially you're thinking 2,500 meters in 2020?

Jason Weber: Yeah, that's the number we've discussed. We've put a rough budget together based on that footage. The discussion really comes down to that's not enough drilling to test all 5 targets adequately. Either that budget expands and we test each target with a number of holes or we prioritize the targets and say, “Okay, these two targets we're going to drill a couple fences across and see what comes out of that before we plan the next phase of drilling there.”

That's sort of the philosophical discussion we have to have with Hochschild. It really depends on, being a producer, the gold and silver price I think probably mentally has a big influence on their budgets and how much money they're willing to set aside to test targets.

Gerardo Del Real: Agreed, agreed. Jason, thank you so much for coming on. Anything else you'd like to add before I let you go?

Jason Weber: No. The only thing I should say, the results we have waiting to come out the last two holes of our Haldane drilling program, we should have those very shortly so hopefully you and I will be talking again soon.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent. Look forward to it. Thank you again.

Jason Weber: Thank you